Umeshisms

I have lifted the following directly from a blog called Graham Weekly, mainly because it's a quirky way of thinking and it caught my eye. I can relate to the one about blog entries, in particular.

Umeshisms: better strategies for life

If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.

Scott Aaronson takes the principle of Umeshisms to be "concentrate on the high order bits" - don't have your life dominated by the effort of avoiding minor negative events, because the optimal strategy doesn't avoid those events completely. "If you have never regretted a blog entry, your blog is boring".

I was thinking about them occasionally the last few weeks, and have tried to come up with decent general form. It goes like this: If you never experience negative event X, you would be better off with a different approach, even though that approach means X might happen sometimes.

From that template you can generate all sorts of wisdom from the ages:

If you never get rejected, you aren't asking enough (Scott Aaronson).
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new (Einstein).
If you never fail, you aren't aiming high enough.
The following I started applying to my own life a couple of months ago: if you've never forgotten to lock your room, you're spending too much time going back to check.